Andy Clark

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In this ground-breaking work, philosopher and cognitive scientist
Andy Clark turns a common view of the human mind upside down. In
stark opposition to familiar models of human cognition, Surfing
Uncertainty explores exciting new theories in neuroscience,
psychology, and artificial intelligence that reveal minds like ours
to be prediction machines-devices that have evolved to anticipate
the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive.
This keeps minds like ours a few steps ahead of the game, poised to
respond rapidly and apparently effortlessly to threats and
opportunities as (and sometimes even before) they arise. Creatures
thus equipped are more than simple response machines. They are
knowing agents deep in the business of understanding their worlds.
Such agents cope with changing and uncertain worlds by combining
sensory evidence with informed prediction. Remarkably, the learning
that makes neural prediction possible can itself be accomplished by
the ceaseless effort to make better and better predictions. A
single fundamental trick (the trick of trying to predict your own
sensory inputs) thus enables learning, empowers moment-by-moment
perception, and installs a rich understanding of the surrounding
world. Action itself now appears in a new and revealing light. For
action is not so much a 'response to an input' as a neat and
efficient way of selecting the next 'input'. As mobile embodied
agents we are forever intervening, actively bringing about the very
streams of sensory information that our brains are simultaneously
trying to predict. This binds perception and action in a delicate
dance, a virtuous circle in which neural circuits animate, and are
animated by, the movements of our own bodies. Some of our actions,
in turn, structure the physical, social, and technological worlds
around us. This moves the goalposts by altering the very things we
need to engage and predict. Surfing Uncertainty brings work on the
predictive brain into full and satisfying contact with work on the
embodied and culturally situated mind. What emerges is a bold new
vision of what brains do that places circular causal flows and the
active structuring of the environment, center-stage. In place of
cognitive couch potatoes idly awaiting the next sensory inputs,
Clark's journey reveals us as proactive predictavores, skilfully
surfing the waves of sensory stimulation.